Literary Precedents for The Man with a Load of Mischief

Martha Grimes

This Study Guide consists of approximately 10 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more -
everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Man with a Load of Mischief.

Grimes is often compared to Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh, all writers of a type of detective fiction known as the novel of detection, which flourished in the 1930s. The focus of novels of detection is the development of characters, and humor often appears.

Christie's influence on Grimes's work is most apparent in the settings.

Christie generally set her novels in small British villages not unlike Grimes's fictitious Long Piddleton; these settings create the novels' atmosphere and have technical advantages such as limiting the number of possible suspects.

Sayers also occasionally used a village setting, but Grimes seems to owe more to Sayers's characterization than to her settings. Sayers's detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, is more fully developed than Christie's rather flat detectives, whose personalities sometimes seem to consist of one or two eccentricities.